


the sea, the city, the road

by afterism



Category: Byzantium (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:57:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/pseuds/afterism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find each other, across the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sea, the city, the road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mammothluv](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mammothluv/gifts).



> Merry Christmas, mammothluv! I was thrilled when I saw your prompts, and I had so much fun exploring what these two did after the film ends.
> 
> The song at the start is from A Mother's Lament, the song that Clara sang to Eleanor when they were hitchhiking.

The mother turned 'round for the soap from the rack  
She weren't gone a minute, but when she got back  
Her baby had gone, and in anguish she cried  
"Oh, where is my baby?", and the angels replied

**the sea**

"Are you coming or what?" Clara says, hooking one leg over the railing and landing, neatly and confidently, on the narrow ledge, the last thing between the bridge crossing the estuary and a hundred foot drop into the water.

"Do we have to?" he says. Still, he steps closer, rests one hand on the railing and peers down at the dark, rolling water.

"It could be the last of the night, or the last of the year, and then where would we be?" Clara calls, the wind trying to whip her words away, but she knows he can hear her.

"We could just get a taxi," Darvell counters, but they're only fifty miles along the coast from a burning fairground and she's not going to start getting sloppy now.

Clara looks at him. "Get over here before someone thinks I'm trying to top myself and calls the police," she says, and, after a pause, he does.

She holds onto the railing with both hands, holding fast against the battering wind trying to throw her off, and leans forward until she's hanging over the water and watches it until the tip of a small passenger ferry breaches beneath the bridge.

"Come on, then," she says, and doesn't bother to check if he's following as she lets go and jumps, feet first and fearless. 

She plummets and then hits the deck hard and he lands only heartbeat after she does, and the boat dips so violently water sloshes over the back and a woman inside gives a little scream - but when someone slides open the door to find out what's happened she's already recovered and grabbed Darvell's arm, pulling them the few short steps to the railing at the very back so they can watch the sea recede and she starts laughing like she's drunk, clinging to him like a girlfriend, and to his credit he goes with it.

"I have money. We could have paid," he says, as they hear the door slide shut again, when there's nothing but a drunk couple enjoying the night air, and they're left in peace, just the roar of the engine and the crash of the boat through the water, grumbling through the darkness.

"Give it here, then," Clara says and disentangles their arms, cold air whipping between them as she holds out her hand. He stares at her. "Do you want to learn my way of doing things, or not?"

He hands her his wallet. She takes out the notes and stuffs them into her bra, then cards her thumb along the neat edges of his carefully constructed ID cards, credit cards and an empty space where anyone else would put a photo of someone precious, and then carelessly flings the whole thing into the estuary with a lazy toss.

"And my warrant badge?" he says, sighs, unsurprised. Either she's becoming predictable or he adapts quickly, and she considers what to do with that.

"We'll keep that," she says. "Could come in handy."

She catches his eye and smiles like she's having fun, like she's letting him into a secret, and tries very hard not to think about the last time she chose not to spend immortality alone. She'd robbed a corpse and grabbed her baby's hand and refused to let go even as she told her everything, even as Eleanor stopped crying and sat very still and listened (and they'd raised her so well, so perfectly obedient, Clara couldn't quite believe she was _hers_ ), and then held onto her desperately until they reached the little stone doorway of an ancient hermit's hut.

She wraps both hands around the rails, icy cold against her skin, and turns to look forward.

 

Eleanor remembers the fisherman she drank as soon they came back to shore, her body made anew and so _hungry_ \- she'd watched him repairing his nets between the waves, the land sinking and rising again with every stroke, closer and closer until Clara caught her wrist and pulled them both out of the foam. Two ghosts on the pebbles for the long moment before Clara's laugh as she grabbed him; the disbelief in the man's eyes as one wet, shrieking woman attacked him and another watched silently; the well of blood around Clara's thumbnail; the desperate sated satisfaction like she'd never been allowed to feel in her carefully measured, orphan girl life. She hadn't felt horrified, even then, because she knew the world was full of horrible things and now she was one too, but the way his hands still clutched at the tear in his nets, the thick point of his needle burying itself in his thumb, lingered.

Frank leans against her heavily as they get off the boat, lurching between her solid weight and every person that passes, blinded by this new sense of every heartbeat - but there's a care home by the shore, a craggy thing watching the grey sea as it slips closer, and she's going to do this right, this time. She's going to make sure they do it properly from the start.

They cut across the beach, every step a slow drag across the pebbles, and Frank's fingernails are drawing blood from her waist because this is too much, she's asking too much to make him wait when there are a hundred pulses surging all around them. 

"Please," she says, touching a hand to his cheek, waiting until his dull eyes focus on her. "For me," she says, and thinks, Clara never asked, but she never made her wait, either. She would find men asleep in their rooms and Clara waiting at the table, tapping a fingernail against the scarred wood, no blood on her hands because she'd already eaten earlier, and Eleanor would ask who was he instead of saying thank you. 

(The first man she found all by herself was three days later as they passed through a town with aspirations of being a city, already overflowing with the sick and the waste and the unwanted, and once Clara has found a house full of girls like her Eleanor had been sent off to play with promises to be back by the morning, be good, don't go too far, we'll be away again in the morning. Two streets away she found a man ageless beneath the dirt, half bent and pockmarked and coughing blood, smelling and staggering like a drunk, and she'd taken him by the hand and into the maze between the houses, and he hadn't struggled when she raised his wrist to her mouth. She still didn't know if he wanted to die, right then, but it felt like she'd discovered something.)

They clamber up the rocks to a flat of grass, all decaying benches and saltbent trees, and she doesn't have time to explain about knowing those who are ready, about recognising the flutter of their heart or the scent beneath their skin - she just whispers the eternal rest over and over into his ear until he starts to repeat it back, parroting like she was taught at the orphanage, and there's an old woman with a medical bracelet around her wrist, watching the sea, and she doesn't look up with her dull eyes until Eleanor's standing in front of her, Frank twitching by her side. 

"I'm sorry," she says, and then, "Peace be with you," and doesn't get any further before Frank stabs his fingernail into the woman's fragile neck.

 

**the city**

They find themselves in the arched doorway of a tiny theatre, tucked away from the main street, and the night has long since left them alone and deserted. Frank's half asleep and pressed up against her side, still not used to the long walks they have between the cars they can hitch a lift with and wherever they're trying to go. There had been a plan, at first, about seeing the world, and they'd used the money Clara had pressed into her hand and whatever they could pick up from the busking Frank encouraged her (whenever they found a piano) to do, to get across the county, first across Ireland and then back to the UK, heading north on the cheapest overnight coaches they could find - but, still, the money ran out, no matter how careful Eleanor thought she could be with it, and now they hitch-hike and walk and sneak on to trains at unattended stations. 

It's almost comfortably familiar, the endless travelling. Frank tries to argue about where they're going, how best to get there, but she _knows_ this - she remembers the days of jumping onto carriages as they sped past the tracks, Clara hanging onto her so tightly she drew blood, or Clara charming their way onto the Post, or having to smile at the farmhand as she sat in the back on his cart, clutching Clara's hand as the bales of straw shook down the road. She remembers when most roads were dirt tracks or cobbled streets. She remembers Clara never telling her where they were going, just grabbing her hand and telling her to pack her bag, and it took her a long time to realise she could say no, and slightly longer than that to realise it was pointless.

A car flashes past the end of their thin street, the headlights illuminating her world in stark black and silver, and out of the corner of her eye she sees vivid burst of something stuck to the wall beside her. There's a scuff of bright red, a streak of a slipped shoe or an old, forgotten splash of paint, and Eleanor is hit with such an unexpected rush of _longing_ that she has to curl up into herself, and pretends it's the cold. 

There had been so many theatres and music halls and rooms above a pub, most barely more than a curtain, and Clara wore red boots and long black feathers and sang with the others, but the crowd (all men, sawdust on the floor and the windows thick with grime) would fall silent when her voice rose above the rest. In the morning light it was all faded and dull, but the little leather purse Clara kept in her corset was thick with coins, and she'd kiss Eleanor on the forehead and sing her something sweet, just for her. 

Frank looks at her like he doesn't want to hear this, but she's always told her stories for herself.

The next night she sees her, as though she'd conjured her up by speaking her name out loud. Eleanor is used to seeing thick eyeliner and tight jeans and dark hair piled high and for a moment feeling like all her organs have vanished, but this time it's just a glimpse of a woman in a red dress, all curves and promises, striding into a hotel on the other side of the road with her head held high. Eleanor stops in the middle of the pavement and she doesn't know _why_ , not until the woman (dark hair loose and softly curled, tumbling gracefully over pale shoulders) glances back just before the door swings shut and Eleanor can see her face, glowing red and white and yellow under neon lights. It's her mother.

Clara doesn't see her, looking towards the other end of the street like she's expecting something, and then the door vanishes her away and Eleanor's across the road and resting her fingertips on the wall beneath the high-set windows, peering into what turns out to be a bar, and she only dimly registers how well dressed (normal, everyday working kind of people, not possibly the sort of place where-) the few people she can see are before Clara steps into view, throwing on a familiar smile that's coy and unsure in the way that means she's after something. 

Frank catches up with her, pulling at Eleanor's arm until she tears herself away from the window, and looks at him. He scans her face, eyes wide and worried.

"Clara," she says, simply, and the concern in his eyes drops sharply.

"She tried to kill me," Frank says, distaste grinding in his jaw, as she turns back to the window.

"She's tried to kill me, too," Eleanor says, offhanded, mostly ignoring him. "Doesn't mean she would actually go through with it."

Frank just stares at her, but she's not paying attention to him at all. Clara moves, disappearing further into the bar, and she has to _know_ \- she slips away from him and she's through the bright light of the hotel lobby and into the dim shadows of the bar before anyone could think to stop her, and then there's the crumpling of a hope she didn't know she had as she turns a corner and sees Clara in her element; on a man's lap, long legs dangling over the side of the chair as she throws her head back and laughs, making sure he only looks where she tells him to as one hand curls around his neck and the other slides under his jacket, nails biting a little into his skin so he can't possibly feel it as she lifts his wallet, and it turns out that Eleanor didn't want to know at all.

She turns, and runs. 

 

Clara looks up just as Eleanor is spinning on her heel, distinctly out of place in her pale greys and winter coat, and everything about the job is forgotten - her world crashes down and she's up and after her in a heartbeat (keeps hold of his wallet out of sheer habit, her hand almost free of his jacket pocket anyway) and the hotel door is just reaching the tipping point of its opening swing as she chases through -

and Eleanor is gone, even as Clara screams her name to the empty street, washed out orange in the bleak city lights and she's crying, great choking sobs that for a few horrifying moments she can't control. She's crying, and she's so _proud_ because her baby knows how to disappear, because in the split second where their eyes met she looked exactly the same, because she's still alive and she's surviving without her, and isn't that the greatest thing a mother could know? 

She takes a deep, steadying breath and finds she's kneeling on the cold concrete, her nails leaving grooves in the pavement. Darvell's nearby, waiting for her word and she could just go, burn this to the ground and walk away, but, this is what she knows. This is what she does, now. By the time she's stood up and wiped her face her mark is coming out to find her, his face teetering between confusion and concern, and she can work with that. 

"Sorry," she says, wiping the corner of her eye and laughing, every angle of her embarrassed and upset. She palms his wallet and slips in close when he offers a hand. "Ex-girlfriend," she says, because she doesn't need the research to know what he likes, to know where to make him look as she performs magic tricks, and he's already staring at her like she's something amazing again as she leads him back inside.

(Later, when the body has been slipped into a hospital morgue and she casually mentions seeing Ella today, Darvell pieces it together. Considers what he saw of Clara doing to keep them safe over the centuries. Considers what Eleanor must have seen, might have hoped.

"We don't have to keep doing it this way," he says, carefully, and Clara fixes him with a look. He resists saying _you could do so much more_ , because they've had that fight and it took him a month to find her again, when she finally let him catch up, when she told him he was worse than her daughter. She hasn't even begun to forgive him, for any of it, but she's enjoying having someone around who appreciates what she does: how every place she leaves behind is a little more beautiful even if it's also on fire. "There are other vulnerable people we could be helping - those who attack the young, the elderly-"

"Ella always takes care of the elderly," Clara grins, quick and vicious, but her mouth twists like she's swallowed something horrible, congealed blood from an old wound when she expectedly something fresh and warm.)

 

**the road**

She finally finds Clara's flat on a dull, grey morning, dawn struggling through the fog, and she's shivering with cold and hunger and having not slept for three days straight, having barely stopped running for three weeks, and she clings to the doorframe like a rock in a thrashing sea. She should have got here days ago - should have started running sooner, should have made sure they were covering their tracks, should have taught him better - 

" _Ella_ ," Clara breathes, a vision in the doorway, and then she's wrapped up in a hug so tight it hurts, and even though nothing's changed she suddenly feels _safe_ , the most secure she's felt in months. This is the closest thing she has (has ever had) to home, Clara tucking her chin on top of her head and squeezing her like she'll never let go, and for a perfect minute she just clutches weakly at her arms and lets herself be held.

"Hi," Eleanor says, eventually, and looks at the floor when Clara releases her. "I was hoping Darvell would still be with you," she says, tight and clipped and still not quite meeting her eyes, so Clara can't see the truth in them - that she missed her so much it ached some days, she's sorry for everything she ever said, her mother is the one thing that doesn't change in her centuries of life and she doesn't know how to live without that. (and she's felt like this before and she knows this, like everything, will pass eventually, but right now all she wants is her mum to tell her everything's going to be okay.)

Clara catches her chin and forces her head up so she can look at her, scanning her face for any sign that something's happened, that someone's hurt her, and it must be as jarringly familiar for her as it is for Eleanor but she looks until her mouth cracks into something softer and she draws her in, presses a kiss to her forehead and calls her my baby.

"You'd better come in and tell me everything," she says, and keeps her arm wrapped tight around her shoulders.

Clara's flat looks lived in in way that their rooms rarely did, like she's carved out a space for herself and settled in, and Eleanor doesn't quite know where she's supposed to fit in. Still, Clara pulls her inside and peels off her bag and her coat and doesn't let go, tucks her feet up under her on the couch and clutches Eleanor's hands as she starts to explain - too many bodies, people who didn't want or deserve it, the Brotherhood finally finding a trail to follow and bearing down with more fire and fury than she was ready for.

"Where's...?" Clara asks, looking triumphant even as her eyebrows furrow with concern, not even bothering with a what's-his-name.

"He ran before I did," Eleanor says, looks away and swallows, because there was a plan but neither of them are sticking to it. There's silence for a long moment, as Clara looks like she's rolling a word across her tongue. 

"And Darvell?" Eleanor eventually asks, looking around as though expecting some sign he's still here, some sign that Clara isn't living here alone. "He's-"

"Busy," Clara finishes, a sharp full stop, and smiles to soften it. "But we don't need him, do we?" Clara says, and gently tucks Eleanor's hair behind her ear, letting her fingertips rest gently on her neck. "You know what I do to people who think I can't protect my daughter."

They fall asleep on the sofa together with the television flickering silent light into the grey morning; her head on Clara's shoulder, Clara's fingers still linked through hers, and even though they haven't changed an inch it still feels like they fit together better than before.

 

Eleanor steals a car while Clara keeps watch and doesn't say anything until they're half a mile out of town, rolling down country lanes as the dusk melts into darkness. They'd left soon after she woke up, a plan only half-formed but they had to start moving again, she didn't know if they had followed her this far, and Clara had thrown a few things into a backpack and paused to lock the door behind her.

"I didn't know you could drive," Clara says, eyes on the road, clasping her hands together.

"I learnt in college," Eleanor says, and shrugs when Clara looks at her. "A while ago. They were offering lessons."

Clara studies her in the reflected light, all shadows and curves and her baby is all grown up, making her own way in the world, and for the first time she thinks the pointed nails of justice did something good in bringing her little girl back to her, even if it's only for a little while. She taps her fingers against the glass and and watches the way Eleanor changes gear, keeps her hands steady on the wheel, driving five miles under the speed limit and carefully signalling every turn.

"So," Clara says, smoothing her jeans down and turning away from the world, focusing entirely on her girl. "Tell me everything I missed," she says, and a smile blooms across Eleanor's mouth, wide and rare.

She tells her about the concert hall she worked in for two weeks, sleeping in the rafters and listening to every performance, sneaking down to the grand piano on the stage at two in the morning and in the interval and while a fire gutted the old theatre next door. She tells her about waking up in a forest surrounded by deer. She tells her about being cocooned in a snowstorm and breaking her way out of a police van and where she learnt to pick locks. She tells how they're going to destroy the Brotherhood, and Clara's never felt prouder, even as she interrupts to argue that there's no fucking way she's letting Eleanor do _that_.

(and later, when the Brotherhood's headquarters are a smouldering ruin and the world is a little bit more beautiful, she tells Eleanor to go, because if she's not the one to say it Eleanor will stay until she gets sick of her mother again, because if she doesn't cut her loose again now she'll never let her go, because she knows this is so very far from the end.)

 

 

**the sea**

She finds her sitting on the promenade, hands folded neatly on top of her crossed legs, and she looks exactly the same even though the buildings she remembers lining the shore have long since crumbled to dust, things shiny and new in their place, and time crawls on.

"Hi," she says, the wind whipping her hair out of its artful pile, and her makeup is a little smudged.

"Hi," Eleanor says, and sits down beside her.


End file.
